The Cloudcast #157 - Automating Data Center Scale Infrastructure

Topic 1 - You started Hashicorp as a side project, a night project. What were you doing that inspired you to start building all these cool tools?

Topic 2 - One of the things I’ve noticed about all of your tools is they not only attempt to hide quite a bit of complexity, but they try and be cloud/provider interdependent. If that mostly for future-proofing, or do you see many people switching platforms (clouds vs. machines)?

Topic 3 - Let’s talk about your latest tool - Terraform. First give us the overview, but then let’s get into where you see it fitting into the bigger picture of DevOps tools and platforms.Topic 4 - With many of your tools, including Terraform, you highlight that it doesn’t really replace existing tools like Chef, Puppet, etc, but rather augments them. Do you find that it’s complicated to explain that to people that might be familiar with tools?Topic 5 - It’s interesting that in Terraform you’ve separated Planning (terraform plan) from Execution (terraform graph). Especially as things scale, it’s really difficult to see interdependencies. What does Terraform do to help both aspects as companies scale?Topic 6 - The set of tools that you’ve created are individually very powerful. Have you see people or customers attempt to abstract them and put them into a broader system (eg. Self-Service Portal; Cloud Broker)?Topic 7 - What are the most common use-cases you see for people using your tools?